Wednesday, 14 February 2018

I am absolutely an existentialist. There is no other label that fits. This isn't some new fangled philosophy or theory that no-one has ever conceived before. All I am doing is following through.
With simple consistency — something existentialists so-called never quite achieved.
Last time, I aimed a barb at Sartre. But, he's OK. Being and Nothingness would do as the one book you took to a desert island. (I've commented before on Heidegger's contemptuous dismissal, 'I'm not reading that dreck.' Bloody Germans, they thought they had philosophy taped, look where it got them.)
My comments on what 'they say' or 'they believe' could have been taken straight out of Heidegger's Being and Time. Certainly. But Heidegger only half gets the point. How could he, when he's so focused on 'Being'? There's no Being and there are no beings. Nothing exists. Nothing that is said is 'true' or 'false'. It's just 'something said', just things humans do with their vocal chords, or pens, or typewriters.
As I am doing now. Except that this isn't really 'saying anything', just as Wittgenstein understood when he wrote the Tractatus. You have to see, see through the words, the scrawly scribbles on the page.
Macmurray (the 'English existentialist') is worth reading (The Self as Agent, Persons in Relation) if you can get past his religious agenda. On the other hand, as I recall he shows sensitivity to discoveries in depth analysis (especially Klein) in his account of 'parent and child' and the 'rhythm of withdrawal and return'. There is an urgent question there about what human beings want. Macmurray thinks it all has to do with 'friendship'. To me that sounds too narrowly focused, altogether too cosy.
Then there's Stirner (The Ego and His Own). He writes more like a journalist than a philosopher. Racy. Vents his spite and contempt on all those weedy socialists and anarchists — and had spite vented on him in return (famously, by Marx in German Ideology).
How's this for a quote:

The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies.

Could it really be true that Stirner died (in 1856) from a fly bite? Or was the legend somehow provoked by what Stirner wrote? (You see, I can still talk about truth, no problem with that!)
Then... what?
I know what I want, and I also know that this has nothing to do with what I want. My wants change over time, sometimes randomly. Everyone has his or her own 'wants'. Some of us want the same things, so what? You can want anything in the universe, even a 'saucer of mud' (pace Anscombe).
Doesn't this need a name? If Hegel's idealism is called 'Absolute idealism' then maybe I should call this 'Absolute existentialism', though somehow that just sounds wrong. Neo-existentialism? The whole idea of labels seems ridiculous. The last thing I want is to tell people how to read me. 'You've got to make up your own damn mind.'
Then again, the notion of consistency, 'simple' or otherwise, seems suspiciously logical, and as I said last time I'm past that too.
Then Again... how can 'existence come before essence' if nothing exists? These hands don't exist. This keyboard doesn't exist. And the molecules and atoms and electrons etc. etc. They do. They are free to do what they do, even if the opportunity for making a 'choice' only comes up relatively rarely. Unlike me, they don't have dreams or desires, their 'choices' are rather restricted compared to the things I could do — whether I 'wanted' to or not.
Or, maybe, something, not they, is doing the choosing, or the Doing. (The evil demon?)
This is all way too premature.
It's understandable, you feel lonely, you'd desperately like to be part of some camp or school. A wolf is so much more effective in the pack. Alone, you're just a target.
Meh.
Freedom is the thing. Or 'radical freedom'. I need to say something about 'Hume's dilemma' (humans are either clockwork or roulette wheels) and how it doesn't apply if nothing exists. Freedom is the only reality. The Doing.
I need to say something about happiness and pleasure (recalling Slartbartfast, 'I'd much rather be happy than right any day,' Philosophizer Black Edition, Appendix 1st February 2017). You can never be 'right' if there is no truth, right? I'd be happy to give up 'happiness' if I could just hold on to that groovy feeling ('butter in the pan', etc.) which is something philosophers have yet to 'analyse' (and when they do, you know what'll come of it).
Double meh.
It really doesn't matter how I feel, or what I feel. When you're onto something, feelings are irrelevant. You just do.

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Monday, 12 February 2018

Only a game?
Remember what Wittgenstein said — think of all the things we call 'games'. That was about the endless variety of language games, and also by implication how 'bad examples nourish bad philosophy' (thinking too narrowly, being overly selective in your examples to bolster your case).
Then what do I mean? I know what I mean and I'll leave you to guess!
The ultimate game: me and reality, one-on-one. Or me and the evil demon. Same difference:

This isn't about a Berkeleian virtual reality game, the conjurer behind the scenes tirelessly (reliably) keeping up appearances, for no purpose (the demiurge of nature). When I picture the evil demon, I imagine all the eyes and faces of all the people who have ever existed. The others. No sacred Other, no partner in ethical dialogue, no Thou (nor an It), just all of you.

No more will I judge myself through the eyes of others. 'O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us./ To see oursels as ithers see us!/ It wad frae mony a blunder free us.' Others are useful. They notice things that you might have missed. (For example, a louse, in Rabbie Burns' famous poem.) So, of course, you need others for that extra perspective that a mirror won't necessarily give you.
For me, this is all water under the bridge. In Metaphysics of Meaning and also in Naive Metaphysics I contrasted recognition of the 'authority of the other' with the mere use of others as my measuring instruments — the way you use a thermometer, or a ruler, or a microcope as a source of information about the world, including information about yourself. I said then that the very possibility of truth presupposes acknowledgement that the other potentially has the power to override my judgements. That was my take on Wittgenstein's argument against a private language. It seemed convincing at the time.
But now truth is out the window. That's what I mean.
Truth is what 'they' believe, or what is 'to be believed' (which amounts to the same thing). Truth is merely the asymptotic point of convergence. Playing the language game by the agreed rules. I'm past that now.
This is what freedom looks like. It's not a cliché. You have to be alive to every possibility, not just those on offer, the ones handed to you on a plate. It's not easy thinking sideways, upside down, every which way except the straight and narrow. (The road they want you to go along.)
I'm not seeking approval for what I do. But I like to see my actions having effects. Who doesn't? I would like more people to read my books, my blogs, etc. Who wouldn't? That's the game this is, or one of the games at any rate.
How high you can 'score'.
But ultimately that's a side issue, mere entertainment. Like looking at funny cats on Facebook.
As stated in the Dedication to Philosophizer (Black Edition) — This is 'For Myself'.
What egomaniac dedicates a book to himself? You misunderstand me. I am simply recovering what is mine. The people I care for, or the things I care about, that's my affair not yours. And I do care about you, even though we've never met. I want you to see what I see.I want you to free yourself.
Of course, one can see the logical thread going through all of this. (Truth depends on such-and-such, but no such-and-such, therefore no 'truth', etc.) But I am past logic too. Or, rather, there are many kinds of 'logic' just as there are many kinds of game. 'The hardness of the logical must' (Wittgenstein). It all boils down to a subjective sense of the compelling. We are all more or less in line with regard to 'the compelling'. Or, we're not. Both alternatives apply. Wittgenstein couldn't disagree with that.
The 'whirl of organism' (Stanley Cavell). Yes, I can see how that fits too.
Like the two readings of Hume: the internal (the system of 'ideas' and 'impressions') and the external (doing a Newton on the 'laws of human nature').
I could go through a whole list of philosophers, but why bother? Sartre, for example, and his Parmenidean 'In Itself'. Why does he hang on to that archaic notion? Because he thinks he must be doing something ontological! Didn't you hear? Ontology is dead, man. You can't do ontology if nothing exists!
The air is so pure and clean up here. Looking down, down on the clouds. (One of my earliest memories, watching an endless carpet of clouds inch by from the window of a turbo-prop aeroplane, the sound of the engines throbbing in my ears.)
But like many moves in philosophy, you realize that at the same time that when everything changes, it can seem like nothing has really changed. 'It is as if before everything was up and now everything is down.' (Quoting from myself, long ago.)
If this was the equivalent of The Truman Show (1998) you wouldn't see any change in my behaviour (apart from the words appearing here). Or, maybe, if and when you do, there will be a hundred different possible 'explanations'. What specific actions are explained by the heavy weight of self doubt or even bad conscience lifted from one's shoulders? All sorts!
— This is just the beginning. Now let's follow the expanding ripples, the line of falling dominoes. The virus of radical freedom, once it takes hold, infects everything.

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Saturday, 10 February 2018

Nothing exists
Nothing is the case
There are no facts
There are no values
There is nothing but the Doing

— Do I believe this? It isn't a question of 'belief' because belief relates to existence, or what is the case, or facts, or values. You believe that something, e.g. that there is life on Mars, or you believe in something, e.g. social justice for the underprivileged. And all the other shades and variations of belief including 'belief in God'.
To appreciate, grasp, accept that 'there is nothing but the Doing' is another kind of mental attitude — sui generis if you like — that is more akin to seeing than believing, provided one doesn't take the term 'seeing' too literally. It's more like 'the meaning of the dialectic'. What you end up with after a series of rejections or negations. The only place left to stand.
I read somewhere (actually, it was a 2008 Guardian obituary for Mark Sachs, author of The World We Found, 1989, which is on my special shelf of books I intend to read) that philosophers are divided between those who believe in 'transcendent realism' and those who don't. Transcendent realism is any theory which says that there is more to reality than merely 'all that is the case', or 'our public world', or whatever. I hold there is more, but somehow the claim 'there is nothing but the Doing' doesn't quite fit. Why?
The transcendent realist 'reality' is out there, in the beyond, something extra added on to what is the case, etc. Whereas the Doing (from now on I will be using a capital letter whenever I use the definite article) looks like it is somehow less. In this respect, it is more like solipsism. (I don't know, would Sachs classify solipsism as 'transcendent realist'?) But it isn't anything like solipsism, for one simple reason: my doing requires that there is something I do things to. There can't be my doing without the doing of reality. And included under the heading of 'reality' is everyone else.
And I mean all of reality, not just the bits I am near enough to make an impression on (although maybe that requires some arguing, cf. the 'backdrop world' in my Metaphysics of Meaning, ch. 25 'God and Realism').
Moreover, the absolutely one essential feature of my claim is that any account that leaves out my subjective world cannot be correct (Naive Metaphysics). If, per impossibile, one could give a theory of a singular 'objective world' — in other words, no 'metaphysical contradiction' between the subjective and objective worlds — then plain, vanilla materialism would be fine, as would the various idealisms, etc.
Leaving out my subjective world, the claim that 'there is nothing but the Doing' has little force. Say if you like that the world we know is all the manifestation of noumenal Force (Schopenhauer), or that it is 'the world as one action' (Macmurray). Those are just 'ways of seeing', maybe very powerful, compelling ways of seeing but that is all. (Not to forget that I argued in Metaphysics of the Photograph that all metaphysical theories are 'ways of seeing', my bad?)
'There is nothing but the Doing' isn't a 'way of seeing' reality because it is the only place left to stand once you reach the end of the road — the dialectic. That's a pretty strong claim. Either you accept it, or you don't. But then again, so many philosophies fail (and philosophers too) because of mere faint heartedness, unwillingness to follow though to the only possible conclusion. (As per Sherlock Holmes, 'When you have eliminated all the other alternatives, whatever remains must be the case.')
(I am not fazed by Hamlyn's criticism of me, 'I can't help feeling that you take Plato's advice to follow the argument wherever it may lead further than is reasonable,' Sophist weblog page 4. Or not too much anyway.)
Closer to my view would be something like Nietzsche's perspectivism, or even the odd theory doing the rounds of analytic philosophy, 'presentism', according to which only the present time is 'real', a claim Dummett originally made in 'The Reality of the Past' (1968).
However, all Nietzsche is claiming is that knowledge is perspectival. He isn't doing metaphysics, because in his mind, the whole metaphysical project relates to the 'last fumes of evaporating reality'. (In other words, he understands metaphysics as essentially concerned with 'transcendent reality'.) Nietzsche is making his claim as a psychologist, a 'geneologist of values', a critic of culture. Life is the thing. Ultimately, the only important thing. And the one essential characteristic of life is will to power.
Presentism is a view I considered and dismissed in my 1978 B.Phil thesis (the original 11,500 word version of 'The Metaphysics of Meaning'). You can say if you like that the past isn't real, or that the future isn't real, or that both past and future aren't real. But the claim is empty unless you can show how that arises through the dialectic. The very fact that there seems to be a 'choice' here undermines any credibility your theory of time might have.
Above all, 'there is nothing but the Doing' is an expression of nihilism. Let reality do as it does, what I do I do out of my own, unconstrained free creative choice. 'I accept myself and my nature as a given fact' simply means that I am where I am, at this particular moment in time, after all I have experienced and been through, after all the choices I have made. There is no other place for me to be. 'My values are objective because they are mine.'
Then what is 'the Doing'? Isn't it obvious?This is a game. It's been said many times before, to the point of being a cliché, but I mean something more, or at any rate something different. There are only games, and games within games, and games within games within games. Nothing else, absolutely nothing. I am playing reality. Or the reality game. Some stakes are low, some high...
... And some too high to calculate, or even contemplate.

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Thursday, 8 February 2018

I wanted to talk about the will. But I don't know what to say about it. I would never have thought there was such a thing as the will, had I not read in some philosophy book (when I was first starting out — it could have been John Hospers Introduction to Philosophical Analysis) that there isn't such a thing. It's a myth. WHAT is a myth? that's the question I wanted to ask.
I know doing. I am doing it now. Doing 'doing'. Typing these words is doing. Thinking about what I'm going to write is doing. Rubbing the sore spot on my forearm is doing. Recalling half-forgotten memories of books I read long ago is doing. Listening out for the postman is doing.
This morning, I went through the usual rigmarole of trying to get myself to get out of bed. It's a common experience with many people, so maybe you know what I mean. I thought, 'Now is the time to get up,' but I didn't get up. I had this thought a few more times. Then, I had the feeling, that increased very gradually, in very tiny steps, that maybe I really was about to get up. Then I just got up. I didn't make the decision to get up, because I'd already made that decision maybe 20 minutes ago, but I didn't act on it. I didn't do anything.
What happened? What was it that made me get up? Well, maybe there was something, something 'noumenal' (Schopenhauer), behind the scenes. But how would that work? We're talking about a second, 'self', unknown to me or anyone else, maybe unknowable in principle, behind or beneath my conscious self. But if per impossible we could take a look at this unknowable 'self' and its actions, wouldn't the same problem arise? How does it get me to get up?
This all looks rather similar to 'homunculus' theories of perception. We're heading for a vicious regress, or seem to be.
So, better to say what theorists of perception say, that there is no mental intermediary that 'makes me do'. I just do. Just as there is no mental intermediary between my mind or self, and the external things I perceive.
However, I'm not trying to analyse the will or action. That's what analytic philosophers do, or did. (Things are changing, times have moved on since Hospers wrote his book. A philosopher is more likely these days to talk of a 'theory of X' rather than an 'analysis of X'.) I could stop at this point and read all the articles on the philosophy of action by Jennifer Hornsby, or maybe re-read Brian O'Shaughnessy The Will (1980) which I've almost completely forgotten after nearly four decades, but that's not the way I work.
What is there to do, if not analyse?
On a neo-Humean analysis of agency and causation, things just happen, and we imagine some extra connection. Or as Wittgenstein puts it in the Tractatus, 'the only necessity is logical necessity'. The idea that my 'willing' to get out of bed has some necessary connection to my getting out of bed is a myth. Agency is simply the fact that events in the world related to movements of my body happen after, or immediately after, an event of my trying to make them happen. Anyone who's suffered sleep paralysis knows what it is like for the connection between "trying' and 'moving' to break down. It's only contingent connection, but luckily reliable for the most part.
My response to that would be that nothing exists and there are no facts. There is only the doing. Of course we talk about existing 'things' and 'facts', but that is just at the level of talk. (As Heraclitus would say.) At the deepest level, doing is the only reality. I mean, my doing — not just what the world does or what people do — because without 'I', the one asking the question, the question wouldn't even arise.
As Heraclitus would say, or maybe Gorgias? (On What Is Not). Now, there's something...
Another thought came to me, a rather more prosaic thought, remembering an oft quoted remark by Bishop Butler, 'Everything is what it is and not another thing.' As I seem to recall, Butler was talking about futile attempts to analyse personal identity. What a philosopher would typically say is, 'Oh, you mean that X is not analysable because it is sui generis.' It's a familiar move. But I'm not just 'making a move'. This seems to be the very point and essence of the claim that doing is the ultimate reality.
But it's not enough to say that. Because I know that there is something I don't know. I don't know what it is, it's an 'unknown unknown'. Otherwise, why would I be searching? What's driving this? Where is this going?
Maybe not down but up. Instead of digging, or diving, I should be flying. Looking down on all of this. Seeing it for what it is. Doing is all there is, it's all about the doing. And yet, for some reason, we don't want to see it that way. We'd much rather there was some story about 'what is really going on', hidden workings buried deep, or even a cunning conspiracy that keeps us all ignorant and confused.
Why not just look and see. It's all there, right in front of your eyes!

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Monday, 5 February 2018

— This is where philosophy begins, here, in this precise place and no-where else. I've talked about my 'idiotic conundrum'. This is it. Here it is.
You can well ask 'what sort of person' would be gripped, when so many are not. Heraclitus had words to say about 'the many', and they are not kind words. The many don't count, they have nothing to say that is of any interest to us.
Or, as the great Parmenides put it, 'two-headed mortals, knowing nothing' (or words to that effect).
The sort of person who is gripped — I hypothesize — is one whose backstory involves conflict and contradiction, going right back to early childhood. I had a loving father who flew into uncontrollable rages. A survivor of the Holocaust but a victim nonetheless. That's something a child of three or four could never comprehend.
Wittgenstein was tortured by his sexuality, according to one account (William Warren Bartley III Wittgenstein, 1973). I'm not in the business of guessing. What I do know is that my Question is, or was, Wittgenstein's Question, and that Wittgenstein's Question is none other than the one raised by the great Parmenides.
My Question? As I have repeated often enough, there are two questions, not one: 'two godheads', as Wittgenstein calls it in his 1914-16 Notebooks. (By the time he wrote the Tractatus, he'd realized that that was something that 'cannot be said', 'The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it' Tractatus 5.64.)
Like Parmenides, Wittgenstein's solution (if you can call it a solution) set the agenda for philosophy for the next century, plus. 'There must be a reason.' But the reason is the reason why we can't meaningfully raise the Question. The reason has to do with the very nature of language and the 'Proposition'.
That was an idea that required detailed work. You can't just state, baldly, that 'language doesn't go there' or whatever. And, as we know, Wittgenstein had two goes at this, the 'simples' of the Tractatus, and the 'language games' of the Investigations — two radically different conceptions of the 'bedrock' (PI para. 217) of linguistic meaning.
The Question is still there, at the back of your mind. But you know, as a competent, responsible philosophizer, that it exists only as temptation. It's somewhere you just can't go. Wittgenstein called it the 'Mystical'. (Ethics is in there too, but that's just another example, Wittgenstein thinks, of what 'cannot be said' because it doesn't consist of facts.)
Flip the coin over, and you have Parmenides. What is cannot be 'what is the case', because what is the case is something that might not be, or might not have been the case — which is 'unthinkable', if what we are talking about is Reality as such. There is only 'what is', or, 'It is'. If you want to do philosophy, then 'It is' is the only thing you can say. The rest is just 'two-headed mortal' opinions about the 'world of Appearance'.
According to Wittgenstein, the Question is unanswerable because of the nature of language and 'what can be said'. According to Parmenides, the Question is unanswerable because there is nothing to think about the very thing in question except that it IS.
Well, if Wittgenstein and Parmenides are two sides of the same coin, what would my response to the Question be? the edge of the coin?

Reality (the 'that') is a doing, and the I-now (the 'this') is a doing. When it rains, or when someone speaks to me, or the atom bomb drops... that is 'reality doing'. For my part, what I choose to do, or not do, is meaningless apart from what reality 'does'. The two are inseparable. And not just 'joined at the hip' either.

There IS (a metaphysical 'is' that has nothing to do with any notion of existence as such) something that comes before 'all there is' or 'all that is the case'. The doing. The doing is the ultimate reality. I believe that the existentialists in different ways thought that too (as I explained, The actual is the issue of my existence) but they didn't quite cap the point. They missed the target, if only by inches.
The doing. If I'm serious about that, not just spinning some tale, then there has to be more to say than what I've said so far. Maybe (big leap here) this is what Heraclitus was really on about: the Logos that IS reality and the Logos in me, or that acts through me. There are no 'things', only 'doings'.
There must be more to say about 'the doing', because otherwise it just looks like another version of the sweeping dismissal of the 'Question' or the 'Mystical' that contemporary philosophers find so easy to do.
More to say. But what to say? That is my new question.

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